


I hope you're travelling well now

by artemis (artemisandapolla9328)



Series: love is the most powerful magic [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Childhood Friends to Lovers, F/M, Hogwarts, liberal interpretations of the wizarding world, wistful longing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 14:35:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20391289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artemisandapolla9328/pseuds/artemis
Summary: His cousin Sibella says he’s destined to become a poet, and if he blushes a little as he thinks of all the romantic things he’s read from other poets, lines about “whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing“, and thinks that nobody would write about love if they knew about friendship — and what being Katherine Gilmore’s best friend meant to him.---The wizarding world is a big and beautiful place, and there are stories of love all around us.





	I hope you're travelling well now

**I hope you’re travelling well now, and there’s stars over your head, and I hope the river carries you everywhere you said.**

_Dramatis Personae_

  
_Ellery Beckett and Katherine “Kate” Gilmore, _childhood best friends  
_ Andrew “Drew” Gilmore, _twin brother to Kate  
_ Elizabeth and Marcus Gilmore, _parents to Kate and Drew  
_ Evelyn Taylor and Nicholas Beckett, _parents to Ellery  
_ Catherine Beckett and Sven Jorgesson, _Ellery’s aunt and uncle  
_ Sibella Jorgesson, _Ellery’s cousin

* * *

_1\. Bloomsbury Square, in the weeds_

Lizzy Gilmore and Evelyn Taylor didn’t know each other, but that wouldn’t matter much. They were both new mothers, and their babies had just reached out to hold hands with one another with no prompting at all. Ellery was a full year and a half older than the newborn twins, Katherine and Drew Gilmore, but he crawls right over to their shared carrier and reaches out for little Katherine’s hand, and they hold hands for a minute as she gurgles.

(neither of them know the meaning of friendship, but that’s exactly what this would become, in the days and years and lifetimes to come).

Ellery and Evelyn come home to find Catherine and Sibella visiting, Ellery’s first cousin planted in his playroom, and Nicholas Beckett shrugging as he offers the spare bedroom for Sibella and Ellery to share. There are a hundred ways that the first five years of Ellery Arthur Beckett’s life could have gone, but every one of them involve Sibella and Ellery growing up side by side, toddling along until he can walk, learning to listen before he learned to talk, learning to believe in the stars and what was written — and if they don’t return to Bloomsbury Square for years, and he doesn’t see Katherine Gilmore again until he’s five, well, perhaps that was written too.

Sibella fills his head with stories of the future, of what she sees, of clouds and rain and stars, and symbols rich with meaning neither of them quite understand, but it’s a lyrical sort of melody that builds in her voice, until the moment it crashes in frustration — a crescendo of an unloved child until Sven reconciles with Catherine, and whisks his only daughter back to Denmark with him. His family has always had bits and pieces of the sight, apparently, and will know how to teach Sibella how to use hers properly, but it doesn’t stop Nicholas Beckett from worrying about his sister, or Ellery from waving goodbye candidly from the window, his mother’s hand on his shoulder in a grip slightly too firm.

The square is the same, five years on, but the babies have changed, and Evelyn can’t help but think her sweet boy has changed too. (his first word was “ell”, and his second word was “star”, and Evelyn wonders if she missed something as a new parent, as a so-called muggle in this magical world, in this world where children could turn other children against their parents — but the truth is, all children are just children, and they belong in the arms of people who love them.)

* * *

_2\. Ministry daycare during the Interior Design Show, London_

They don’t meet again until Kate is four and Ellery is five, and the Gilmore twins are at the Ministry daycare because Lizzy Gilmore is attending the London Interior Design Show. It’s a tired and beleaguered Marcus Gilmore who drops them off in his plum Wizengamot robes before hurrying off to a trial on the tenth floor. Ellery doesn’t look up when Drew sits beside him to colour, but Kate shyly asks if he can pass the pink colouring pencils, and he blushes for a moment before nodding and passing them over.

(Kate likes colouring with Ellery so much that she begs to go back to daycare. Drew doesn’t like it, but they’re twins, so if one goes, so does the other. In the end, they compromise and end up at daycare three times a week, and it’s the days Ellery looks forward to the most.)

Fridays are activity days — mini Quidditch was Ellery’s least favourite yet, but his mum had taken him ice skating before, and he finds it’s similar to the cloud-dancing lesson that the daycare offers. He leaps in excitement when they say they can have some free time to play with the dancing clouds, and he nearly leaps off to snag one for himself before he sees Kate by the sidelines. He makes a silly face at her before he heads over to take her hand.

(She’s wearing a little pink dress, and her hair is up in a ponytail, and she looks a little bit like a ballerina, and Ellery thinks she’s probably the best cloud-dancing partner he could ever hope to have.)

Neither of them are good, but they manage to hold hands the whole way around the air-space, making big sweeping S shapes as they criss-cross with clouds beneath their feet. An instructor comes over, and shows Ellery how to put his arms around Kate like they’re dancing a waltz, and he feels like a grownup for the first time, despite the fact that he’s only five. His hand lingers on her waist, not wanting to hurt her, and it hovers there in strange anticipation, always holding but never quite settling.

Drew frowns at them from the side, but soon enough, he’s caught up in a race with the other boys from the daycare to see who can get across the air fastest, and Ellery and Kate are left to practice their dance hold in peace.

* * *

_3\. the first poem (and the story of the Pleiades)_

Ellery discovers poetry the same time he discovers reading — that is to say, in bedtime stories, and in picture books, and just about everywhere. His cousin Sibella says he’s destined to become a poet, and if he blushes a little as he thinks of all the romantic things he’s read from other poets, lines about “whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing“, and thinks that nobody would write about love if they knew about friendship — and what being Katherine Gilmore’s best friend meant to him.

It means that sometimes, Sibella, five years older and insistent that Ellery is her best friend, gets upset when he insists that Kate hang out with them even while the Jorgessons are in London for the summer, but he couldn’t give up his afternoons with his best friend.

It means that sometimes, Drew shoots him irritated looks, but he consoles Kate by saying they’re just different. Ellery is her best friend and the person she can dream with — Drew is her twin, and they’ll always be two halves of a whole, he says with all the wisdom of an eleven year old, but they don’t have to be best friends.

Drew doesn’t really care about pretty things, and Ellery likes to pick flowers with Kate in the square where they first met (not that either of them remember it, but the Witches of Bloomsbury Square have always loved youthful, extra hands in the summer, and if a couple hours weeding means he can bring a bouquet of wildflowers to Kate’s door afterward, well, that seemed entirely worth it to him. If the old ladies coo when the two of them walked by, he pretends not to blush and insists that the two of them are “just best friends”.)

The summer Ellery turns eleven is the same summer that Sibella tells him about the Pleiades, and how the seven heavenly sisters were hung in the sky. The dancing maidens that brought rain, and the missing sister, Merope, who seemed to twinkle in and out of existence.

Sibella wove beautiful tales — storytelling had always been a part of their family, and Aunt Catherine told stories just as well as his own father, and Grandmother Georgina before. Ellery could barely remember his Nana, but if he closed his eyes and listened for the sound of the swish of the waves, he would remember the story she told about the pirate lady on the shores of Boston, who ran away from home to chase the seas for gold and ended up falling in love with a birdman.

But the story of the Pleiad stuck with Ellery — and one night, at the end of the summer when Merope had just winked out of existence, Sibella had solemnly said that she’d /seen/ that Ellery would find her — he’d find the Pleiad, and that would be his, his starry, starry night.

(and so Ellery adopted the story of the Pleiad for his own, and sometimes, he asked Kate if she thought he’d ever find his Pleiad, like Sibella had insisted he would. He thought it might not be so bad if he never did, because he had Kate still, but he never said so much out loud. They were ten and eleven, after all, and they had the whole world ahead of them.)

(What Sibella doesn’t see is the story of Merope and Sisyphus side by side, the eternal love of a star, just enough to push a king to chase immortality. It’s a beautiful love story, but it’s a futile one, and Sibella would save her darling cousin from a lifetime of futility. And if Merope came and went from his life without her noticing, well, Sibella had never claimed that the sight was perfect. Just that she could see — and that what was written would come to pass, whatever that meant.)

* * *

_4\. (Hogwarts, and sorting, and from studying to adulting)_

Hogwarts is both different and the same — Ellery goes a year before Kate does, and sorts into Ravenclaw, the house of eagles and eccentrics. He doesn’t really like his dorm mates, or his fellow classmates, but he finds a friend in Mara Kay, who’s quiet as a mouse, but funny and pretty good at Astronomy, which is Ellery’s favourite subject. There’s a darkness in the air that lingers over the whole school, and there are events reported in the Prophet and letters from home that sound more and more dire, but it never seems to touch them at Hogwarts.

Hogwarts is safe, and Hogwarts has never fallen — or so Binns says, when they manage to get a lecture about anything other than a Goblin rebellion.

It’s just a year until Kate comes to Hogwarts, and Ellery’s convinced that they’ll be in the same house — how could they not be? They were two peas in a pod, and the third pea was Drew, but Ellery had known Drew for as long as he’d known Kate, and he could tell right away that Drew was going to be a Gryffindor.

He spends his Friday afternoon free period after Transfiguration writing letters to Kate, telling her about the shining waters of the lake, and the fat, fluffy snowflakes that he watches from Ravenclaw tower.

He doesn’t write that he misses her (because he’s twelve the January after Christmas, and twelve year olds don’t miss anyone), but he does send snippets of the poems he’s working on, and wonders if she likes them.

Ellery gets letters back like clockwork, with the post on Monday morning, and sealed with a pretty pink wax and styled seal engraved with her initials. “K. I. G.” for Katherine Imogene Gilmore. Ellery starts signing his letters “E. A. B.”, but it doesn’t look quite as nice, and so he finally decides to go by E. A. Beckett (a.k.a. your Ellery) and if the first time Mara catches him signing his name like that, he blushes, well, that’s just how he signs it, alright?

It’s to everyone’s shock, including her own, when the hat insists on Slytherin, and Ellery doesn’t know what to say as he looks at the spot he’d cleared for Kate beside him at the Ravenclaw table. She’s bright pink as she puts the hat back on the stool, and walks slowly over to the Slytherin table. There have been Slytherin Gilmores, of course, but Ellery’s eyes draw a line from the spot where Drew was sitting at the Gryffindor table, to where Kate’s being welcomed by Carmen Rodriguez, a third year in Slytherin, and wonders if there have ever been twins in enemy houses.

Things are a little different after that — Kate finds friends in her house, while Ellery continues to reject the friendly “helpful advice” and competition that comes with being a Ravenclaw, but they manage to find time to spend with one another. They practice cloud-dancing one time in February, when Flitwick charms the Quidditch pitch into an arena for “cultural diversity and experience“, which Ellery files under “an excellent excuse to do something other than the stupid sport known as Quidditch“.

He puts his arms around her, hands resting in the proper spots, trying not to notice how different this feels from the time before. He knows Kate — has hugged her a hundred times, and knows that she’s light as a feather to lift, but his hand lingers at her waist, suddenly aware of how soft she is, how delicate, and he hopes that the Slytherin girls won’t turn her nose up and her head high, and that she’ll always be the same Kate she’s been.

She seems fits the same as she always has into his arms, and it’s like no time has passed at all, as they sweep from one end to the other. He even tries to do a lift with her — it’s supposed to be easier, on a cloud, but they don’t quite manage and go tumbling onto the gross, a green stain marring Kate’s pink skirt.

She’s a _Slytherin_ after all.

His parents withdraw him from school that January — Nicholas Beckett is an Auror, Ellery repeats to himself — not a Watcher, or a Death Eater sympathizer or anything else, and he’s married to a muggle, which makes Ellery a halfblood, and if the word suddenly sounds dirty in the eyes of the rest of the world, well, it had always sounded ugly to him.

It means months of skipping from hiding spot to hiding spot as they went on the run, his birthday passing at Bluebirds Safe House. He’s not allowed to send letters to Kate, but he does listen on the radio and hopes that being a Slytherin will keep his pureblooded best friend safe.

He wonders if Drew stands up for the other Gryffindors, or joins them in holding their heads up high, and thirteen year old Ellery wonders if he would hold his own head up, if he had been left at Hogwarts to fight. He wonders if Kate keeps her head down, or joins the Slytherins in following the Carrows out of sheer Slytherin survival instinct. He wonders if Kate has survival instincts at all — the sweet girl in organza and taffeta and satin dresses of his childhood had never had much spite about her, but he knew there was some steel to her. Few others saw it, but it came out in the moments when she picked herself up after a fall, or a disappointing mark on an essay, or the sheer will to be better than Drew in everything, no matter that her brother was stronger or faster.

Sibella says Ellery's not a fighter, but he thinks if someone were to treat Kate poorly, that he might be tempted to roll up his sleeves like the other boys, and point his wand at someone’s chest, and yell things he didn’t mean, like _Expelliarmus_ and _Stupefy_ and _Petrificus Totalus_. He doesn’t know any curses except the tickling one, and even then, that one didn’t seem so much a curse as a joke.

Sibella’s a pureblood though, in a country that already had its fight about purity of blood and kind and all the things that he didn’t understand until this very year, and even then, he doesn’t know if he really gets it at all. He thinks that maybe if everyone read T. S. Eliot’s poetry, with the _dead things floating in the water_, that maybe they would understand more — but all he really understands is the bolt of lightning that gives life, and the sound of nothing as he watches the clouds pass him by.

He likes to imagine that they’re the same clouds that Kate’s looking at, all the way up in Scotland, even if he knows that isn’t true. That maybe they can still be best friends even if she’s stuck facing down Alecto Carrow as a Dark Arts Professor, and he sits in Bluebirds waiting for Harry Potter to win. His dad caught him holding a broomstick in the backyard, twirling around as he imagined Kate dancing with him, and didn’t say anything, but sent little Kenny and Tasha to him. Ellery teaches Kenny how to hold Tasha in his arms like he’d learned so many years ago with Kate, and he feels like a grown up when his dad catches his eye and nods.

(He doesn’t see his parents doing a dance of their own, in the cramped single room the three of them shared in the west wing of the manor, but then again, he’d never noticed his parents’ love the same way Marcus and Lizzy Gilmore showed their love.)

The moment Voldemort is declared officially dead, it’s like the sun has cleared, and the flowers suddenly remember that summer’s almost here, and he sees them bloom everywhere, out of season like a greenhouse. The sunflowers at home bloom for days and months afterward, compelled by the sudden sun after what seemed like years of clouds. Ellery’s dad retires from the Auror force when they’re done hunting down the last of the Death Eaters, and for the first time in his life, he spends time with both his parents at home.

It’s kind of nice — he imagines this is what it’s like at the Gilmore home, when Marcus and Lizzy and Kate and Drew are all getting along. It happens less and less now, since Drew started getting more rebellious, but Ellery still doesn’t pay Kate’s twin much mind.

* * *

_5\. Drew runs away to “make it big” with his band_

Ellery graduated to a trust fund set up by his grandmother, and he lets Antonia Lawrence convince him that it’s his ticket to being a writer.

_(“How many people are lucky enough to have something to support them while they try to make it big?”)_

Sibella echoes the statement, though Sibby has never been worried about the gold. It’s the words that he writes, the sound of the scratching nib against parchment that soothes his cousin when she visits to deliver her prophetic dreams on scrolls he doesn’t open — and for the year that Ellery waits for Kate to graduate, he writes.

He writes about the things he sees, and the stray cat at the corner, and the spider web on the wall of the cafe by Bloomsbury Square. He writes about the cracking glass and the dissonant voices of his parents as they argue about what to do next — retirement doesn’t suit Nicholas Beckett well, and Evelyn’s at a loss with a husband that rolls over when the alarm clock rings, and Ellery writes about a bell that has no sound. Kate’s going to write her NEWTs in a month or two, and Ellery thinks he might have a manuscript, and through it all, they’re still best friends. Ellery dates Annie for a while, and thinks that she’s enough work to be his Pleiad, the one Sibella told him about all those years ago, and they have sex for the first time under the giant sequoia tree in the Royal Botanical Gardens one night.

Ellery thinks it would have been magical, if the world around them weren’t already quite so dazzling.

Kate graduates with a dozen honours that Ellery never managed, and Annie leaves for China the next week, and he’s torn between celebrating his best friend’s achievements and mourning the loss of his first love. The Gilmores throw a party for both their children, and Ellery’s glad he goes, because around eleven that night, a drunk Drew Gilmore stands up on the makeshift stage where a string quartet had played that afternoon, and announces with the strum of a guitar that he’s turned down a position with the Ministry of Magic’s Transportation Broomstick Regulation department, and he’s starting a band.

Started a band already? There was a band, and there wasn't a Ministry job, and all at once, it seemed like the whole of the Gilmore house had had a fuse light beneath it.

(Ellery gifted Kate a new eagle feather quill earlier that week to sign her offer letter with the Department of International Magical Cooperation. She starts in July. She saves him a dance that evening with the string quartet, and if Ellery feels his hands linger on the small of her back, and her waist, and lower to her hips, he tells himself it’s all in the name of the dance they were doing, and not anything improper.)

The supposedly happy night ends with a screaming match between Marcus and Drew, and Drew storming off for the night — Lizzy and Kate are both in tears, and Ellery’s shirt is still wet when they fall asleep on the Gilmore couch, an old pink quilt tucked around the both of them.

Ellery’s twenty, and technically a man, but Lizzy Gilmore has always liked him, and Marcus is too angry with Drew to bother raising a fuss about his only daughter falling asleep on the couch with a boy that’s probably spent as much time as the Gilmore dinner table as the Beckett table, in all honesty.

It doesn’t change the fact that the next morning, they wake up with limbs entwined, and Ellery groans as he turns away. It isn’t as though he hadn’t seen the changes in Katherine Gilmore’s body over the past few years, or failed to notice that she’d turned from tiny ballerina to lovely young woman, but she’s his best friend, and he’s newly single, and if there’s anything he wanted to avoid, it was hurting her while he was rebounding from the loss of Annie.

He disentangles his legs first, and then his arms — Kate’s still half asleep when he shifts her to the side so he can pull his arm free, and there’s a moment where he thinks she might just hang onto it, and he wonders if he can live without a limb — but she lets go, and he breathes a sigh of relief. He kisses her on the cheek, and says he’ll call her later, and hugs Lizzy good morning and goodbye without taking her offered cup of coffee before apparating right home.

(Annie’s sweater is still hanging on the back of his writing chair, and he stuffs it into an enlarged envelope before he gives himself time to think about it, and sends Augustine to China, and his poor owl takes two weeks to go there and back and refuses to deliver his letters for another month while he recovers.)

* * *

_6\. (they are in love. duh.)_

Kate meets some guy named Tyler at a bar where Drew is playing, and love is quick to follow. Or so he hears—Ellery refuses to go to Drew’s concerts on principle, because of how much he’d hurt Kate the night Marcus Gilmore officially declared that “he only had a daughter”, and so he never had the chance to meet this Tyler person. 

To be honest, Ellery thought Marcus was being a bit dramatic, and in the wake of his own parents’ marriage unravelling at the seams, he found it disorienting to watch as Kate’s family did too. But they leaned on each other, and if she spent as many nights in his bed (with him sleeping on the couch) as she did at Tyler’s place, well, he would never mind. His door was always open, and it wasn’t like he was seeing anyone anyways. (And if sometimes, he caught Lizzy Gilmore looking fondly at the two of them as he dropped Kate off at home after work, or picked her up for a best friend dinner on a Saturday night, well, he chalked it up to her being sentimental, and not anything else.)

Ellery had read enough poetry to know about falling in love at first sight, about the gaiety of flowers and the eternal sun that shone to know that sometimes, love hit people like a silent stunner, a jet of red light casting the world into endless disarray. What no poet had ever warned him of though, was the slow burn of a candle, carefully nurtured from years and years of friendship, and the sudden lack of oxygen that would snap the life right from it.

Poetry had never prepared him for the moment he turned his face over to find Kate’s next to his, lips inches from his own face and the sudden desire to kiss his best friend, despite the fact that they’d fallen asleep like this at least once a week, every week since they were tiny tots.

(he doesn’t kiss her. not then, at least. Not really, not aside from the hundred half-kisses and cheek kisses and lips brushing necks by accident, and elongated hugs that only broke because Ellery had to stop something from stirring within. if those aren’t normal for best friends then he doesn’t know what is, and if Kate’s not his best friend, then suddenly there’s a woman-sized hole in his heart he doesn’t know how to fill.)

It’s been years since they danced together, and Ellery can feel the muscles in his legs aching already as they float up on high. She feels familiar in his arms though, like she’s always felt from the moment they first touched, and as she hums the melody of the song, and they twirl and swirl and swish across the sky, Ellery lets himself imagine that this could be it — him and Kate for the rest of their lives, dancing and laughing and holding one another, and Ellery wonders if that’s enough — if that’s enough for love.

Because isn’t it love? He thinks so, when Kate catches his eye at a particularly ridiculous moment in a turn, and he feels the smile cross his face. She knows him as well as he knows himself. She’s been there for all the times he’s opened the small envelope and realized that he wasn’t cut out to be a writer. They’d suffered their heartbreaks together — him of Annie, and her of the realization that her parents imperfect marriage. They’d met her half-sister Nyami together, knuckles white as they both tried to picture this exotic, foreign woman fitting into the Gilmore home.

Tyler is an unsaid silence between them — Ellery’s met the guy once, and had to keep his mouth shut when Kate asked him later what he thought. Not good enough for his Kate, he wanted to say — he didn’t even have a real job, just a sailing gig running errands, and Kate was poised to rise up the international diplomacy ladder and become a top negotiator and she couldn’t have a layabout for a partner.

(somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows that she can’t have a rejected writer for a partner either, but he saves that argument for when he’s in his own flat, staring at his own ceiling, battling his own demons.)

In the end, it’s the adult colouring books that do him in. Evelyn gets both of them a colouring book for their stockings that year. They generally do Christmas mornings with their own families, before meeting up somewhere to exchange gifts of their own. Usually it’s the coffee shop by Bloomsbury, though sometimes now it’s just Ellery’s flat, the upper room of his parents’ home with an added separate entrance. She absentmindedly asks him to pass the pink colouring pencil, and he hands it over without a second thought, but when her fingers brush the top of his hand, he freezes.

She’s twenty-five, and he’s twenty-six, and it’s been twenty years since they first met. They’re kissing before he really comprehends what is happening, but he only has to catch her beautiful blue eyes to know that this is okay, that the hundred burning questions in her eyes don’t have to do with whether or not this is what she wants, but what happens next.

He doesn’t know the answers to those questions, but when his hand rests on her waist, pulling her in to deepen the kiss, it feels different from the hundreds of times that his hand has been there before. It feels settled.

It feels like home. 

**Author's Note:**

> hello! I've never posted anything to Ao3 before, so consider this my wee intro. I'm Samie, having been dabbling in wizarding world and wix fiction for a long time, but not really brave enough to post anything anywhere. If there's someone out there reading things, thank you! 
> 
> if you want to chat, i'm aburnishedthrone and blackinkpen on tumblr. xx Samie


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